This piece pertains to a structure of political-philosophical argument that has become widespread in public thinking about queerness. It is written out of a frustration with, an anger at, queer people, including myself.

The argument runs something like this: the normativity of social roles - including (especially?) those relating to the matrix of sex(uality) - require the figure of an excluded being against which the coherence of that norm is defined. In a sense, this is a kind of transfiguration of Jacques Derrida’s logic of the supplement, wherein the coherence of any system requires a kind of included-exclusion which thereby deconstructs the system in its very construction. In Judith Butler’s reading of Foucault’s introduction to the hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin’s journal, the limit of the matrix of representation we call “gender” is reached, such that “Herculine is not an ‘identity,’ but the sexual impossibility of an identity”. Now, perhaps the most significant aspect of Butler’s position, and no doubt its truest element, is that sex/gender is the result of a kind of acting-out that cannot be thought in terms of a pre-existing identity, but rather whose articulation prevents us of speaking of identity in any substantial sense. That is to say, there is no substance of “male or female”, neither in the biological nor, of course, the socio-psychological (there is no “body” as such, let alone a “wrong one” that we could be born into). Yet we live in a world in which substance is acted out: the problem, then, for gender theory in general is to think the categories necessary for the description of this normatively mandated process, to think how it is possible that substance could be performatively constituted.

But there is another argument here that it is the brilliance of Butler’s book to sneak through the gate. That is, given that this “performative constitution” is the sort of doing that constitutes something as the case (recall, of course, the judge who declares “guilty!” and thus constitutes the defendant as a convict) it must thereby lieoutsidethe matrix of constituted representation. It is this which is the condition of possibility of what Butler callssubversive gender acts, the kind of act that, like Herculine, cannot be understood within matrix of representation that in its commitment to the substantialism of patriarchal categories disallows the thought of these categories as being acted-out, as producing the appearance of substance as so many effects of these multiple and always illegitimate acts. For Butler,

the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found precisely in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a failure to repeat, a deformity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effect of abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction. [1]

This is really the key political moment in this great foundational text of contemporary theory. Precisely because it locates inallconstitution of gender a moment of the Herculininean failure to be categorised in its varying forms - notably the “parodic repetition” of drag that representatively mirrors gender but in fact performatively constitutes something altogether different - queerness is thus located as the necessary included-excluded moment in all of our representations of sex-gender-sexuality. There is then a kind of (ontological?) difference between queerness and queer people, wherein the former is a necessary condition of gender(ed) representation, the latter are just those who have more explicitly failed to repeat their performance, those of us a bit too ill-disciplined for patriarchy.

Butler’s conceptual virtuosity, their undoubtedly far-reaching arguments, have allowed them to revolutionise several philosophical fields, not only that of feminism, and so it is no surprise that this argument has echoed out much further than the academy to which its arguments are indebted.[2]What this has allowed for is an insistence on the ontological difference between queerness and queer people, such that a particular kind of gendered expression which celebrates its performative constitution is destabilising to patriarchy, and which is only contingently related to queer people insofar as this latter are predisposed toward such performances, and sometimes unable to do any other sort of performance. Queerness is thereforere defined here in a way that makes its explicitpoliticisationpossible. Of course, queer people have, as long as sexuality and gender has been the concern of the state, been necessarily involved in politics, but what Butler’s redefinition accomplishes is the claim that the political character of queerness is no longer secured in its negotiation with the state, but rather is related to its persistent destabilisation of patriarchal matrices of representation. We can now arrive at what feels like a slogan of queer politics of late, that queerness is “inherently”political. It is not just inherently political, it has an inherent politics, that is, its destabilising position is necessarily anti-patriarchal and, by virtue of the magic-trick permitted by intersectional analyses, thereby connected to all other struggles, and as such anti-capitalist. Hallelujah! Communism in the present.

This is a little unfair on Butler, I admit, but the politics is broadly there, and repeated. In “Critically Queer”, an essay which appears inBodies that Matter, the claim is, again, that subversive performative acts, such as those articulated in drag performance, are radical (only) to the extent that they call the truth-regime of sex into question. That is to say, to outline the queer moment in the constitution of heterosexual norms that is always present as cis-heterosexuality’s constantly effaced condition of (im)possibility. Thus Butler’s move, as we must always know, is to consider how resignification is possible in this performativemode, constantly implicated in that which it opposes. The answer, of course, is located in this ontologisation of the concept of queerness as a moment of all gendered acts, indeed a condition on discourse in general. But its ontologisation means that Butler has a problem locating what is distinctivelyqueerabout a particular act, what makes one queer and another not, if queerness is constantly located as the productive site of discourse itself. Butler, it seems, can provide no concept of this, but rather always makes a particular refrain in varying forms that function as something of a terminological constellation around the real moment of significance in their work. The clearest summary is as follows:

The resignification of norms is thus a function of their inefficacy, and so the question of subversion, of working the weakness in the norm, becomes a matter of inhabitingthe practices of its rearticulation. The critical promise of drag does not have to dow ith the proliferation of genders, as if a sheer increase in numbers would do the job, but rather with the exposure or the failure of heterosexual regimes ever fully to legislate or contain their own ideals. [3]

There is something here of an immanent critique, though its relation to its Hegelian or Frankfurt School variants is left (perhaps deliberately) unclear. But what is this “inhabitation” of a practice of rearticulation, upon which the politics of queerness now seems  to hang? We appear to be approaching the claim that “queerness” is accessible by something like an authentic form of Being-queer that is separated by a radical difference from being a queer person, always having to do with a particular politics ofcalling into questionthe norm. And if this is read to be queerness’s real function within the performative construction of all gendered norms, not strictly as a representational other against which these norms are defined but rather a moment of failure in the en-actment of those norms themselves, then such calling-into-question is really the mode in which queerness is representationally registered. Butler’s sense of an inhabitation of queerness might then, via this sense of being-at-home in queerness, offer us a surprising appearance of a well-known formulation, albeit in another form, that queer gender is that gender for whom its gender is in question. All problems of queerness then become the problem of this non-relation between queerness and queer people, where this latter finds itself in representation yet must always attempt to find its home in queerness. ‘Queerness’, then, is always destabilising to gendered norms, and thus always political, though its entry into representation is only possible by a calling-into-question that involves an authentic inhabiting of the ontological structure of discourse, an authenticity always articulated as the impossibility of all performative authenticity. While Butler’s position may vary well disallow any appeal to an authentic maleness or femaleness - even a sense of an authentic queerness itself -  this sense of inhabiting queerness as critical instability calls into being the possibility of a queer person who is not inhabiting this queerness, where this queerness is constructed at such a general level so as to be a condition on all discourse. It is in this sense that Butler ontologises queerness: even if it is raised to the level of always destabilising the possibility of ontology, it takes this status only in being ontologised as the condition of impossibility of ontology.

Such a position leads to a widely acceptable politics of inclusion and universality - especially when combined with the solidaristic politics of intersectionality with which Butler opens their argument inGender Trouble - that locates the possibility of a feminist politics not in a shared characteristic (since, strictly speaking, people do not have genders or sexes according to Butler), but rather in the shared goal of an abolition of patriarchy. Intersectionality, rather than merely being read as a necessary identification of the ways individual subjects are constituted and dominated at the site of intersection between varying relations of domination, now reads each of these relations as reciprocally constitutive, such that there is no sense of what patriarchyiswithout white supremacy, no sense of queerness without a resistance to colonialism, and so on. As such, the interconnectedness of all struggles allows for some of the more politically questionable claims - for instance, that polyamory is necessarily connected with anti-colonial struggle - which thereby allows for a sense of activism through a set of choices one applies to one’s own life, by virtue of their apparent connection to all other modes of domination. No doubt there is not a struggle against oppression that we should not be committed to, and the interconnectedness of, for example, the genocide of Palestinians since 1948 by the settler colonial state of Israel is funded and technologically aided by the data-production of the tech industry which is now forming a new fascism in the United States. But claims to interconnectedness that imagine a total social space in which all relations can be said to depend on one another both misunderstands the radically disconnected quality of our lives under globalisation, but also allows for a form of political activism that functions as a resignation, a participation in only one’s own individual life, and which takes on the whole by its (often deeply tenuous) connection to all others.

The problem in ontologisations of queerness is that by establishing them as general conditions on (gendered) discourse they thereby lose all partiality, and thus all sense of an opposition to anything beyond a loosely-defined norm. “Queerness” becomes accessible to everyone, as long as they are regarded as somewhat “calling into question” gendered norms. In a sense, this is what has allowed TERFs in the UK to refer to straight white women as “gender non-conforming” just because they have short hair: it’s essentially true![4]There seems to be little, then, that would separate queerness in this rather minimal sense from others in the queer community, who lie further outside the bounds of normative gender enactment for whatever reason. The attempt to articulate a notion of “queerness” that allows for radical inclusivity now flattens the varying and distinct representations of this “queerness”, reducing its political meaning to null, an empty signifier in which seemingly all can participate if they make the right choices about what shoes to buy, or what haircut to ask for. This is not anemptyingof the political meaning of queerness by capitalist appropriation, but rather a process by which the establishment of queerness as ontological condition ensures that it loses all connection to its diffuse, particular discursive representations. Nonetheless, the necessity of discourse means that a certain set of representations have no doubt become associated with “queerness”, though these are now completely arbitrary once queerness has been generalised as that which lies as the condition of (im)possibility of discourse. This is a queerness whose politics has now ceased to exist entirely, since it bears no necessary relation to anything other than living truly with the always-extant deconstruction of norms that is already occurring: there is nothing, strictly, that must be changed, from the point of view of “queerness”. There is no politics of queerness.